Cosmo the Merry Martian Archives - Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources

If you’re observant and know your vintage comics characters, you may already be familiar with this guy: Cosmo the Merry Martian, who had his own Archie Comics title for six issues in the 1950s, back when the Space Race was a thing, and has appeared sporadically in the publisher’s digests ever since.

A couple of years ago, Cosmo began popping up for little cameos in Archie comics, and now he’s making a guest appearance in Archie #655 after his flying saucer crash-lands in Riverdale. The story is scripted by Archie veteran Tom DeFalco — he started his career as an editorial assistant at Archie — and drawn by Fernando Ruiz, who tells 13th Dimension he’s a longtime Cosmo fan:

Cosmo’s been a favorite of mine since his stories turned up in the Archie digests I read as a kid. Ever since I first started drawing for Archie, I hoped for the opportunity to draw him. Impatiently, I would sneak Cosmo into a lot of the Archie stories I drew in the form of a Cosmo cup, a Cosmo popsicle, or even a stuffed Cosmo doll. Now I get to draw him in a story where he really appears! It’s a dream come true!

Archie even had a “Where’s Cosmo” contest in March, inviting readers to look for the blobby extraterrestrial in Ruiz’s recent pages. If you want to get a look at the original Cosmo, check out these pages on Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. Archie #655 will be out in April.